U.S. Sanctions Bill Advances as Nicaragua's Local Elections Loom.
| Autor | Witte-Lebhar, Benjamin |
Just as they did a year ago before Nicaragua's last presidential and parliamentary elections, lawmakers in the US are threatening the Central American country with economic sanctions, this time in the run-up to nationwide municipal elections.
The proposed sanctions are part of the Nicaragua Investment Conditionality Act (NICA), a bill that was first submitted to--and approved by--the US House of Representatives following a series of controversial power plays by Nicaraguan leader Daniel Ortega, who blocked the country's leading opposition group from challenging him in the 2016 elections and ousted its members from the legislature (NotiCen, Aug. 25, 2016). The already long-serving leader went on to win the contest easily (NotiCen, Nov. 17, 2016), earning a third consecutive five-year term and fourth overall, not including his tenure as head of Nicaragua's post-revolutionary junta government (1979-1985).
The NICA legislation called on the US to oppose non-humanitarian loans to Nicaragua (from multilateral development banks of which the US is a member) unless the Ortega government took "effective steps to hold free, fair, and transparent elections, and for other purposes." The November 2016 elections were, by most accounts, neither "fair" nor "transparent." But with Washington caught up in its own tumultuous elections--held just three days after the vote in Nicaragua--the bill soon ran out of time and momentum and fell by the wayside.
Given the chaotic political situation in the US since then, it came as something of a surprise that lawmakers would return their attention to Nicaragua. And yet, in April--just three months after US President Donald Trump took office--Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican from Miami, did just that. Together with a number of colleagues, including Democrats, she submitted an updated version of the sanctions bill, NICA 2017, that again calls for conditioning loans but unlike its predecessor, contains language demanding that the Ortega administration also crack down on corruption and refrain from harassing human rights defenders (NotiCen, April 27, 2017).
NICA 2017 quickly cleared the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere and was approved, in late July, by the House Committee on Foreign Affairs (NotiCen, Aug. 24, 2017). Then, on Oct. 3, it went to a full vote in the US House of Representatives, which passed the bill unanimously despite lobbying efforts by the Ortega administration and by the...
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